Cowell Grants Dying Wish
Bethany Fenton (seated, left) backstage at ‘Britain’s Got Talent’. (The Sun)
A five year-old girl died just three days after achieving her ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ dream by singing for Simon Cowell.
Brave Bethany Fenton, who had an inoperable brain tumor, pleaded with her parents to perform ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ in front of the reality TV boss.
Her wish was granted last Saturday when she sang to Simon backstage and told him a knock-knock joke before the TV show’s nail-biting final.
Bethany also met some of the finalists including 13 year-old drummer Kieran Gaffney who wore her hospital tag on his wrist for luck.
But sadly she lost her fight for life at breakfast time Tuesday at Oxford’s Radcliffe Hospital after a sudden deterioration in her condition.
via foxnews.com
Proof that Simon Cowell may actually have a heart…
6 Wonderful Ways to Use This Year’s Cherry Crop
It’s that time again! Cherries are becoming ripe on the tree, and whether you prefer sweet or sour, they can bolster your pantry with several tasty treats for months to come. As this was our first year living a new home with 2 amazingly fruitful trees, we’ve had a great time picking and planning for how we will use them. Check out the ways we will make this year’s modest cherry harvest last!
Assuming that the birds haven’t eaten all of your harvest (you’ll know your cherries are ripe when the birds start to steal them), you can research your particular type of tree to determine when they are ready for pickin’ and eating! Pesky birds getting too many of them? We have had great success with hanging scratched DVD’s and CD’s from the branches. The reflective light is distracting for the birds, and they’ve pretty much left our crop alone.
Picking can be time consuming, but if you’re up for taking the cherries off the branches by the stems (instead of taking just the fruit), you can usually get 3-6 cherries at a time. I enlist the help of all my kids to do this. The older ones can get high up on ladders, while the younger ones use a makeshift scaffolding that’s wide enough to walk on safely and is lower to the ground. There will always be those beautiful cherries that live at the top and we won’t be able to reach. We’ll consider this our gift to the wild birds that live in the area!
via wisebread.com
They forgot to mention cherry pies! Can’t wait…
5 Steps to Create an Integrated Social Content Ladder
Sure, social media takes a lot of time, but probably not as much time as you think. Too many companies and organizations are reinventing the content wheel for every social outpost they maintain. A better approach is to create a content ecosystem that allows you to repurpose and cascade your best information.
Instead of a series of self-contained initiatives, build yourself a content ladder.
Follow the ‘via’ link for 5 the easy steps…
Starbucks Used Social Media to Get One Million to Stores in One Day
Starbucks’ Vice President of Brand, Content and Online, Chris Bruzzo, is on stage at the Mashable Media Summit today and he just revealed that last year’s Free Pastry Day was a whopping success, driving more than one million people to stores.
As we noticed, activity on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook became electric on the day of the event as the free pastry news spread in digital form. Bruzzo’s credits fans with the idea to use social media to drive new business, and his remarks confirm that the swell of social media activity drove customers to visit Starbucks stores in droves.
Bruzzo also speaks to the success of the company’s Tax Day green initiative to get customers to bring in their own tumblers in exchange for free coffee, which — like Free Pastry Day — was primarily promoted online via their Facebook Page. Also, the company’s MyStarbucks Idea has generated more than 80,000 ideas and Bruzzo credits Product Manager Brad Nelson for helping them tap into the power of Twitter.
Right now there’s no big brand better embracing social media than Starbucks. The coffee retailer has managed to dominate on Facebook, made news as the first company to offer a nationwide Foursquare deal, and was selected to try out Twitter’s Promoted Tweets ad platform before other advertisers will have the chance.
via mashable.com
Why We All Hate Consultants (and Why It’s Okay)
When my company is stuck, I’m just as inclined to hire an outside advisor as other leaders are. But I hate it. Hiring a consultant means something needs to be fixed, or grown, or that I don’t know what to do next. I’m not talking about contractors whom I hire to do what I need and they are supplemental labor. I’m talking the consultants where I hire them to advise me. Hiring them usually means we’ve already failed in our first effort. It mostly means we are vulnerable. We need. So I believe we should all hate consultants. You probably already do. It’s okay. I give you permission.
I love Nilofer Merchant’s perspective on things — it’s so different from what I hear day to day, and yet so wise. Follow the ‘via’ link for the rest of this article and follow Nilofer Merchant in social media — just try to keep up!
Twitter Hits 2 Billion Tweets Per Month
According to Twitter CTO Dick Costolo, about 65 million tweets are sent on Twitter each day. This equates to roughly 1.96 billion tweets per month, a stat that’s corroborated by Pingdom’s estimate of 2 billion tweets per month.
Just over a week ago, we reported that Twitter hit the 15 billion tweet mark. The service announced its ten billionth tweet just a few months before that, and hit the one billion tweet milestone back in the fall of 2008. Twitter’s growth curve is clearly accelerating.
Costolo also stated that the service sees around 135,000 new registrations each day; we’re not sure how many of those new users are unique people versus new accounts for business or other purposes. Another unknown is exactly how many of these registrations end up being regular users of the service and how many accounts drop off after a month or two.
To take a closer look at some of Twitter’s stats, including adoption, attrition and actual tweet content, check out this infographic on Twitter’s growth.
via mashable.com
Burson-Marsteller Fortune Global 100 Social Media Study
Following in the footsteps of consumers, large international companies are now becoming active participants in social media. A recent Burson-Marsteller study found that 79 percent of the largest 100 companies in the Fortune Global 500 index are using at least one of the most popular social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or corporate blogs.
Like the Fortune 100 study found, Twitter is the social media platform of choice among the Fortune Global 100. The study found that 65 percent of the largest 100 international companies have active accounts on Twitter, 54 percent have a Facebook fan page, 50 percent have a YouTube channel, and one-third (33 percent) have corporate blogs. Only 20 percent of the major international companies are utilizing all four platforms to engage with stakeholders.
Companies’ platform preferences also differed among regions. Companies based in the United States and Europe are more likely to use Twitter or Facebook than they were to have corporate blogs, while companies from Asia-Pacific were more likely to utilize corporate blogs than other forms of social media. However, Asian companies will use Twitter or Facebook to communicate with Western audiences (for example, Toshiba).
Follow the ‘via’ link to get the presentation…
Use Soluto To Improve Your Windows Boot Up Time
Does your Windows machine take a long time to boot up? (Insert snarky “switch to Linux” joke here). Well a company has developed a remedy to improve Windows boot time, and it is called Soluto.
The way the application works is simple. It installs, then it asks you to reboot and then it watches your boot time and tells you what is taking up the majority of that time. It allows you to pause the item (does not start up again until un-paused) or you can delay its startup. It will wait until the initial set of applications is loaded before attempting to start your delayed applications.
This program works well for techies and entry level computer users alike. If you are an expert user you can take action on all your items and have a great list to work from on speeding up your boot up. A novice would be able to pause the items that they know they do not use or have already uninstalled.
via makeuseof.com
I’ve been using Soluto since the first day it popped up on the radar. It works nicely — I especially like the delay feature for non-essential startup items. If you’re scratching your head wondering why your computer is getting slower and slower, Soluto may be an asset to you…
Firefox or Chrome; which one should I use?
- Image via CrunchBase
This question is NOT a slam dunk! Also, you may be surprised to know that the answer depends on what computer platform you use…
“Which Should I Use on Windows: Firefox or Chrome?
There’s no short answer to this question, really, since neither browser is clearly better, so instead of a straight out “Use X” recommendation, let’s consider the pros and cons of each.
First, in our regular web browser performance tests, Chrome has regularly beaten up the competition or come in a very close second in most categories, while Firefox rarely leads the way. That might seem like a pretty big deal, but most browsers actually perform really well these days, so the fact that Chrome beats Firefox in most of our performance tests doesn’t mean Firefox is extremely slow—it just means that compared to Chrome, it’s not the fastest.” Source: Which Browser Should I Use: Firefox or Chrome? – Web browsers – Lifehacker
“But that brings us to another important point: Bloat. Despite the fact that Firefox generally does pretty well on memory use tests (strangely enough, it regularly wins that test in our browser performance tests), a lot of Firefox users are increasingly frustrated with slow-downs caused by what they see as browser bloat. It’s not at all uncommon to see a Firefox installation eating up more than any running application on your system, and while the memory consumption itself isn’t that big of a deal (Chrome eats a lot of memory, too), the high memory usage is often accompanied by serious browser slowdowns, which is a very big problem, and one that, anecdotally, at least, we hear from tons of Firefox users and very few Chrome users. (Presently company included.)
So what keeps Firefox users coming back despite Chrome outperforming it on Windows by most accounts? One of the biggest issues is extensions. Firefox’s extension ecosystem has long been a selling point of the popular open-source browser, and if there’s anything you wish your browser did differently, chances are there’s a Firefox extension to address it.” Source: Which Browser Should I Use: Firefox or Chrome? – Web browsers – Lifehacker
“Unfortunately, in our experience, Chrome for OS X is still much too young for full-time adoption. Remember, Chrome for Mac launched quite awhile after the Windows version and has been around much less than a year overall. Like Chrome on Windows, it shows a whole lot of promise, but it’s also prone to the occasional non-responsiveness and other bugginess that we aren’t used to and probably shouldn’t be seeing from a prime-time browser.” Source: Which Browser Should I Use: Firefox or Chrome? – Web browsers – Lifehacker
Me? I’m using Chrome more and more every day as Chrome versions of my indispensable Firefox addons become available. What about you?
Steve Jobs to crowd: ‘We’re having a little problem here’
Apple‘s chief exec and irreplaceable master of ceremonies has few if any equals when it comes to wowing audiences during product demos, but even Steve Jobs‘s famous reality-distortion field couldn’t protect him from an embarrassing Wi-Fi snafu during the big WWDC keynote Monday.
About 20 or 30 minutes into the big iPhone reveal, the Wi-Fi network that Jobs was using to show off Web browsing on the iPhone 4’s revamped screen conked out, leaving Apple’s normally poised, ultra-confident CEO a bit red-faced as the audience stared at a giant blank Web page.
“Our networks in here are always unpredictable. They are slow today,” said Jobs, as he waited, and waited, and waited. No dice.
Then Jobs asked the audience for a little assistance. “You know, you could help me out if you’re on Wi-Fi, if you could just get off. … I’d appreciate it.” Naturally, the members of the audience — probably half of whom were furiously live-blogging away — roared with laughter, and the guffaws only grew louder when an error message popped up reading “could not activate cellular network.” AT&T, anyone?
“Yep, I know that,” Jobs replied testily, as the wireless problems dragged on for another minute.
“Well, geez, I don’t like this. I’m afraid I have a problem and I won’t be able to show you much here today,” groaned Jobs, who finally resorted to showing off high-resolution photos from the iPhone 4’s photo roll, to some appreciative applause.
Then Steve tried the Web again — and still, no luck. “Well, I’m sorry, guys, I don’t know what’s going on,” he said, looking around for help. “”Uh … Scott, got any suggestions?”
Of course, some snarky goofball in the audience just couldn’t resist. “Verizon!” the guy shouted, and the audience roared again.Jobs smiled. “We’re actually on Wi-Fi here, so … “
Anyway, within another minute or so, the Wi-Fi was back, and Jobs moved on, albeit with the occasional plea to members of the press to please, please turn your Wi-Fi off. (The collective answer: Yeah, right.)
via news.yahoo.com
roflmao! There is a God and He has a tremendous sense of irony…
Which social media type are you?
I would say that social media success is gained by being all three.
Observe, respond, engage. And the observation part comes first. Why, you ask?
Well, Twitter is not a broadcast channel – it’s two-way conversation condensed into the most popular micro-blog on the planet. Imagine going to a party, jumping onto the nearest table and screaming, “HI EVERYBODY, LISTEN TO ME, LISTEN TO ME, LISTEN TO ME” over and over and over and over again. The response would be less than favourable.
Rather, try turning up to the party, see who’s attending, listen, mix, mingle, observe, add conversation where valuable or helpful, engage the most interesting individuals, make a point of passing on contact details, and leave after a fabulous evening.
Social media is pretty much the same – if you use the broadcast method only, it’s a waste of valuable social media space, and audiences switch off rapidly. And when they’re gone, they’re not coming back any time soon.
Try observing, learning, listening. A few responses, some engagement, add value and help. Give, give, give.
Me? I say ‘consume, create, and communicate’. Consume with Google Reader, Create with Posterous, Communicate with social media. What does your workflow look like?
Top 10 Most Downloaded Business Applications
via makeuseof.com
I believe you can download any of these at http://ninite.com — God’s gift to geeks who have to install software!
Bright, shiny objects! 
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